City residents deserve better

Published 6:12 pm, Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The post-mortem on the debacle of Blizzard `13 in Bridgeport will come later.

And it will have to answer the question of what was so wrong with the city's planning for this long-forecasted storm.

The result of whatever planning occurred was a nightmare, a city of largely rutted, slippery byways more reminiscent of a medieval village than the state's largest city.

And people in Bridgeport are understandably outraged.

This is not to say that handling a storm of this force on the narrow, congested streets of a compact city is ever easy. But it's been a long, long time -- if ever -- that streets in neighborhoods all over the city were absolutely untouched by a plow a good 72 hours after the last flake fell, as many were on Tuesday. Mind-boggling.

And yes, Mayor Bill Finch can talk about the "yahoos" whose cars got stranded at the height of the storm, but the fact is at least some of those "yahoos" were hard-working people coming home from a job. Not everyone has the luxury of skipping work in bad weather.

Among the questions the post-mortem should address are: Did the city move in time to lock up the services of private contractors, with their dump trucks, bucket loaders and plows, to supplement its own force?

Was it the right idea to pull crews off the road for three hours at the height of the storm? Safety is paramount, of course, and heavy plows trying to operate in whiteout conditions could do more harm than good. But as Gov. Dannel P. Malloy pointed out Monday, he'd advised municipalities to plow through the storm. Who was right?

Were parking restrictions put into effect early enough?

And so on. People in Bridgeport literally stuck in their homes for days by impassable or unplowed streets are seething and deserve better than this.